The Spectre and Meltdown security updates will slow down your Windows PC

By Patrick Devaney

Jan 11, 2018

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Has your PC been working a little slower recently? It could be that your PC is suffering from one of the side effects of Microsoft’s recent update, designed to close up the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. For those unaware, Meltdown and Spectre are the two recently discovered security breaches that affect almost all processors.

Microsoft has warned that the patches will affect the performance of Windows computers. Here is the summary of what Microsoft have discovered so far:

“With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.

With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.

With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.

Windows Server on any silicon, especially in any IO-intensive application, shows a more significant performance impact when you enable the mitigations to isolate untrusted code within a Windows Server instance. This is why you want to be careful to evaluate the risk of untrusted code for each Windows Server instance, and balance the security versus performance tradeoff for your environment.”

What this all means is that if your PC is from before 2015 you’ll see a negative effect on performance. According to The Register this effect could be anything between 2 and 14% of overall performance.

As it is the processors that are effected most this slowdown will most be experienced whenever they’re in use, like for web browsing or if you’re doing more complex tasks. Unfortunately, for now at least, Microsoft hasn’t come up with any other solutions to deal with the Meltdown and Spectre problem.

If your PC is running a little slower you can check out the solutions below to try and bring a bit of speed back into your life.